It is desirable that personal care absorbent articles, and especially garments such as diapers, training pants, or incontinence garments, without limitation referred to generically now for ease of explanation as “diapers”, provide a close, comfortable fit about the waist and legs of the wearer and contain body exudates while maintaining skin health. In certain circumstances, it is also desirable that such garments are capable of being pulled up or down over the hips of the wearer to allow the wearer or care giver to easily pull the article on and easily remove the article. Other garment openings such as sleeve or pant cuffs and necklines may benefit from similar elasticizing.
Various schemes for producing elastic waistbands on disposable diapers have been proposed. Diaper waistbands are generally made by stretching an elastomer, applying the stretched elastomer to the diaper components, typically non-elastic in the waistband area, and allowing the elastomer to retract, thus gathering the attached diaper web components in the waistband area. The gathered waistband will then ungather when applied to a wearer, to give the waistband circumference some extension while the elastomer produces a retractive force holding the waistband snug to the wearer.
In another known method of making elastic waist bands, U.S. Pat. No. 4,968,313 issued Nov. 6, 1990 to Sabee, teaches the application of a relaxed elastic element to a relaxed diaper web component which is subsequently drawn or stretched to change the molecular orientation of the fibers of the web and permanently deform the fiber structure to produce a waist band of the gathered web and the retracted elastomer for the garment.
However, the gathered-material waistband arrangements of the known art may apply excessive force to the skin of the wearer resulting in discomfort, red marks on the skin and other undesirable effects. There further remains a need for alternative methods of making waistbands for disposable garments which provide a softer, more conformable fit to the wearer at the waist and leg openings, while continuing to provide ease and economy of manufacture, and adequate performance.